Epitaxial growth of thin films and control of defects in thin film heterostructures are key considerations for the next-generation microelectronic, optical and magnetic devices (H. J. Queisser and E. E. Haller, Science (1998) 281: 945, S. Nakamura, Science (1998) 281: 956, S. Mahajan, Acta Mater. (2000) 48: 137). As device feature sizes are getting smaller, a single dislocation is liable to control the device performance. In the well-established lattice-matching-epitaxy, where lattice misfit is small (i.e. less than 78%) the film grows pseudomorphically up to a certain thickness (critical thickness) before it becomes energetically favorable for the film to contain dislocations (J. W. Mathews and A. E. Blakeslee, J. Crystal Growth (1974) 27: 188, J. W. Mathews in “Epitaxial Growth”, Part B, Materials Science Series (1975) 560, Academic Press, New York). In this case, the dislocations are generated at the surface and then they glide to the interface. The Burgers vectors and planes of the dislocations are dictated by the slip vectors and glide planes of the crystal structure of the film (J. Narayan and S. Sharan, Mat. Sci. Engineering B (1991) 10: 261). On the other hand, if the dislocations are generated at the edge of islands during three-dimensional growth, the geometrical constraints determine the Burgers vectors of the dislocations, which lie in the film-substrate interface. For example, during three-dimensional growth of germanium on silicon, it was found that 90° dislocations with a/2<110> Burgers vectors were created at the edge of germanium islands lying in the (001) film-substrate interface (F. K. LeGoues et al. Phys Rev. Lett. (1994) 73: 300). It is believed that the lattice matching epitaxy during thin film growth is possible as long as the lattice misfit between the film and the substrate is less than 7-8%. Smaller lattice misfit leads to smaller interfacial energy and coherent epitaxy is formed. Above this misfit the film generally will grow in a textured or largely polycrystalline manner. Such films contain plane boundaries. Plain boundaries consist of dislocation, which impede charge carrier movement and thus deleteriously affect the performance of semiconductor devices.
Accordingly, there is a need for electronic and semiconductor devices where a single crystal thin film layer of arbitrary crystal structure is epitaxially grown on top of a pre-selected substrate and where a lattice misfit between the epitaxial layer and the substrate is arbitrarily large.